Can Smell-O-Vision Save VR?
Consumers have been slow to purchase VR headsets, largely due to price and limited content. But several startups are making devices that will give people a whiff of the virtual world.
By Jon Kalish
Smell-O-Vision was introduced at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. Created by a Swiss inventor named Hans Laube, it piped a variety of scents through a network of tiny tubes to individual seats in a movie theater. Needless to say, Smell-O-Vision wafted into oblivion.
But now, 80 years later, a digital reboot of the concept is being pursued by several start-ups that are manufacturing devices and add-ons to VR headsets that’ll give consumers a whiff of the virtual world.
Feelreal
Feelreal Inc. makes a $299 7-ounce mask that hooks into existing VR headsets—the Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift and Go, HTC Vive, or PlayStation VR—and covers the mouth and nose. It has raised more than $300,000 from 700-plus backers on Kickstarter and Indiegogo and is expected to ship to backers by January.
The Feelreal connects via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and dispenses individual scents, which cost $5 each or $49 for a pack. Eventually, 250 scents will be available, including thunderstorm, spring forest, burning rubber, and brown bread. The company, which is based in Brooklyn but has an R&D office in Kiev, Ukraine, will create custom scents for a fee.
Gary Mostovoy, founder and CEO, said that in recent months, Feelreal has been working with 10 partners to create scents for games including Guns’n’Stories: Bulletproof, Death Horizon, Skyrim, Arizona Sunshine, The Last Day Defense, and Beat Saber. Feelreal’s website promises the mask will also make use of touch by vibrating and blasting the user’s face with air or mist. And Mostovoy predicts that eventually the mask will be used with content on YouTube VR that has an aroma track attached.
In addition to gaming, the mask can be used for meditation, and if users download a mobile app, they can use the mask without a VR headset as an aromatherapy device, with scents from Bogdan Zubchenko, a Ukrainian perfumer.
Vaqso
The Vaqso device from Japan is a bit pricier. Originally announced for $999, the olfactory add-on will now cost $1,380, but a release date has not been announced.
Vaqso boasts an affiliation with the French perfumer Francis Kurkdjian. Few details are available about its line of scents, though it apparently will include a zombie smell. Vaqso founder Kentaro Kawaguchi has been described as a scent-technology guru; he’s reportedly created more than 300 scents. He runs a company called ZaaZ, which makes a machine that produces a variety of food smells for storefronts.
AromaJoin Aroma Shooter
Another Japanese company, Kyoto-based AromaJoin, makes a tennis ball-sized device called the Aroma Shooter, which doesn’t rely on liquid-based scents or attach to a VR headset; it connects to PCs, smartphones, and IoT devices.
LA-based Positron is using AromaJoin with its Voyager chair, which is described as a “full-motion chair platform designed for cinematic VR.” The chair and the Aroma Shooter will be used for the viewing of a forthcoming three-episode film Le Musk, directed by Slumdog Millionaire composer A.R. Rahman. An Aroma Shooter Mini that can be worn like a pendant is also in the works.
OVR Technology
A Vermont start-up, meanwhile, is readying another olfactory VR device that, initially, won’t be focused on gaming or entertainment.
OVR Technology was started two years ago by four entrepreneurs who met at a Burlington, Vermont, maker space called Generator. Aaron Wisniewski was there working on his edible scent and fragrance business Alice & the Magician. In a nearby cubicle, Matt Flego and Erik Cooper toiled on M/E Design, an industrial design and prototyping business.
The trio, along with Wisniewski’s brother Sam, later teamed up with students at the Champlain College Emergent Media Center in Burlington and Champlain alum David Stiller on an olfactory VR Project that became OVR Technology. Its candy bar-sized device attaches to VR headsets and sits just above the user’s nose. The battery-powered add-on, currently referred to as the OX1 on OVR’s website, contains a custom-made cartridge with nine different scents in tiny cylinders. The scent actuators in the device are one of six patented aspects of the technology.
“It might fire one, two, three micro-droplets that are only a micron in size or less,” said Aaron Wisniewski. A micron is a millionth of a meter. The tiny droplets are dispersed in bursts that last less than a millisecond.
We weren’t allowed to photograph OVR’s cartridges or the machinery in its office, a warehouse in Burlington’s South End. The cartridges are coated with a special liquid the company regards as a trade secret. The nine mini-cylinders collectively hold 2 milliliters of a water-based liquid scent. (A thin hypodermic syringe holds one milliliter.) Beta testing indicates that each cartridge is good for two weeks to a month of regular use.
Wisniewski, who admits to having a fondness for designer fragrances, directed a colleague working on the scent of burning autumn leaves the day we dropped by. His brother Sam, Flego, and Cooper were on hand as a series of visitors tried a demo of the OVR device in which handheld VR controllers were used to pick up virtual pizza ingredients (garlic and basil) and smell them. An earlier demo done with an HTC Vive attached to a PC involved a campsite experience in which users could start a fire, roast marshmallows, light a citronella candle, make bacon, and open a beer.
Flego and Cooper, who have mastered everything from woodworking and metal work to electronics and computer programming for their prototyping business, used a phenomenon known as piezo electrics to control the size and volume of the scent droplets. Piezo electrics involves the creation of an electric charge, when mechanical stress is applied to materials such as ceramics or crystals.
OVR Technology is in the process of making 200 developer kits consisting of hardware and software. VR content developers can use OVR’s software to integrate the firing of scent at precise times based on interactions in a VR environment. This is done with the game development platforms Unity and Unreal. A dozen units are out now being tested and much of the remaining 180 or so kits to be made are spoken for, according to Wisniewski.
One of the first units went to Albert “Skip” Rizzo, a University of Southern California psychologist who’s been using VR to treat military veterans suffering from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Rizzo’s award-winning VR systems are used at VA centers around the country and run a program he created called Bravemind. It uses exposure therapy, which involves patients re-visiting the traumas that caused their psychological scarring.
Since 2004, though, Rizzo has been using a scent machine in his VR therapy that he describes as cumbersome and expensive. After learning of Rizzo’s work, the Wisniewski brothers, Flego, and Cooper flew to Los Angeles to demonstrate their device, but it was not without a little drama.
During the cross-continental flight a part became detached, necessitating a quick repair job en route to the initial meeting with Rizzo. Flego started soldering in a cafe but when on-lookers noticed the fumes coming from his table, he was thrown out before he could complete the repair. He continued the job in a restroom on USC’s campus, finishing just before security arrived.
“It was pretty shady,” Flego recalled before bursting into laughter. “It looked like we were working on a bomb.”
Rizzo was impressed with OVR’s device, declaring it “a remarkable piece of technology” that is smaller, cheaper, and more useable than the scent system he’s been using. “This is a dream come true for us to have people with the technical expertise to build the actual equipment but also had the knowledge to create different smells,” Rizzo said. “I think [Bravemind] is an ideal application for them to really put their system through its paces. It’s a leap forward for us.”
OVR was able to make most but not all of the scents Rizzo requested. These include the smell of diesel, sweat, cordite, burning rubber, gunpowder, and a Middle Eastern market. The smell of burning flesh and burning hair are still in the R&D phase, Wisniewski said.
OVR’s olfactory add-on will be included in the next iteration of Rizzo’s VR systems, which will be shipped to VA centers and other clinical settings involved in PTSD work. Rizzo expects that within the next year there will be at least 100 sites around the US where the olfactory VR technology will be available.
Flego stressed that the company’s marketing effort initially will focus on the healthcare, education, and training sectors of the economy. He said that even though OVR is not diving into the gaming market initially, it does want game developers to adopt its technology.
Some time in the next six to 12 months OVR’s technology will be available at VR World in Manhattan, according Tommy Goodkin, head of content for the location. Goodwin has tested the OVR device and thinks it will be a fun offering for visitors to the 12,000-square-foot facility, which bills itself as the largest Virtual Reality destination in North America. VR World has 50 bays where customers can play games and check out ride simulators. When OVR’s add-on arrives, Goodkin says he’ll have to explain to customers that this is an emerging technology and is still being developed.
Goodkin concedes that a very small percentage of VR consumers are buying peripherals at this point, largely because the costs are high and content is limited. But he calls olfactory integration with VR “one of the final pieces of the puzzle to full immersion [since] scent is a really primal experience and it gives us a lot of spacial cues and other tools for navigating the world.”
Originally published at https://www.pcmag.com on December 13, 2019.
